CBPP Associates

Jeffrey R. Brown is the William Karnes Professor of Finance in the College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also serves as Director of the College of Business' Center on Business and Public Policy, and as Associate Director of the NBER Retirement Research Center. Prior to joining the Illinois faculty, Dr. Brown was an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. During 2001-2002, he served as Senior Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where he focused primarily on Social Security, pension reform, and terrorism risk insurance. During 2001 he also served on the staff of the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security.  In 2006, President Bush nominated, and the Senate confirmed, Dr. Brown as a member of the Social Security Advisory Board.

Professor Brown holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Masters of Public Policy from Harvard University, and a B.A. from Miami University. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Faculty Affiliate of the Institute on Government and Policy Affairs, and a Fellow of the TIAA-CREF Institute, the Employee Benefits Research Institute, and the China Center for Insurance and Social Security Research. Professor Brown is a member of the American Economic Association, the American Risk and Insurance Association, and the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Professor Brown has published extensively on public and private insurance markets, including publications in The American Economic Review, The Journal of Political Economy, The Journal of Public Economics, The Journal of Monetary Economics, The Journal of Risk and Insurance, The National Tax Journal, and numerous books. He is the recipient of the Lumina Award for Outstanding Research in Insurance and E-Commerce. Professor Brown is co-author of the book The Role of Annuities in Financing Retirement from MIT Press, and is co-founder of the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, published by Cambridge University Press. He has served as a consultant / expert panel member for the Executive Office of the President of the U.S., the General Accounting Office, the U.S. Treasury, the World Bank, and several private firms. Prior to graduate school, he was a Brand Manager at the Procter & Gamble Company.

Stephen P. D’Arcy, a professor in the Department of Finance and the John C. Brogan Faculty Scholar in Risk Management and Insurance, teaches courses in principles of insurance, property/liability insurance, casualty actuarial science, financial risk management, and corporate finance. His research focuses on financial pricing models applied to insurance, dynamic financial analysis, financial risk management of insurers, and public pension funding.

His teaching has been recognized with many teaching awards, including the College of Business Alumni Association Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award, the Commerce Council Outstanding Teaching Award - Large Class and Small Class, the American Risk and Insurance Association Innovation in Instruction Award, Burlington Northern Foundation Faculty Achievement Award, the Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and Commerce Alumni Association Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award

He is also the winner of the various awards including the Casualty Actuarial Society Dynamic Financial Analysis Call Paper Program award for best paper; University Scholar, Journal of Risk and Insurance Awards, Dorweiler Award for best paper in the Proceedings of the Casualty Actuarial Society. He is a fellow of Casualty Actuarial Society and has been awarded an Actuarial Education and Research Foundation-Casualty Actuarial Society research grant.

Professor D’Arcy is currently the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Casualty Actuarial Society. He has previously served President of the Casualty Actuarial Society and as President of the American Risk and Insurance Association. He has also served as associate editor of the Journal of Risk and Insurance from 1992 to the present, of Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance Theory from 1989-97.

He has acted as a consultant to the Casualty Actuarial Society, New England Actuarial Seminars, and Miller, Rapp, Herbers & Terry--Consulting Actuaries. He has presented seminars on financial topics to a number of major insurers.

Dr. David Ikenberry is a professor and chair of the Department of Finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds a B.S. degree from the Pennsylvania State University (1983), an M.M. from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University (1985), and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois (1990). Dr. Ikenberry started his academic career at the Jones Graduate School of Management at Rice University, in Houston, Texas. After twelve years at Rice, he returned to the University of Illinois. He teaches investment and corporate finance to both graduate and executive students and has received several awards for his work in the classroom, including winning prestigious awards for teaching in 1996 and 1999 while at Rice. In 1997 and again in 2002, Business Week magazine named him among the best instructors in the U.S.

Dr. Ikenberry's research concerns a broad array of empirical issues in finance. A substantial portion of his work has focused on issues relating to long-horizon stock returns, a young and often debated area of inquiry in finance. Much of his work challenges fundamental notions of informational efficiency in equity markets. Past studies have focused on unexpected long-horizon return performance relating to specific corporate events, including stock splits, exchange listings and proxy fights. His more general work on the unusual properties of long-horizon returns has been used to help explain why professional money managers frequently under-perform the S&P 500 index, even when investing in S&P stocks. Perhaps his most noted work concerns stock repurchase programs. He has authored several papers in this area looking at performance subsequent to both U.S. and Canadian firms who have engaged this now widespread corporate transaction. His work provides insight into issues about how and why firms repurchase stock and garners substantial interest in both the academic and corporate communities. His current research investigates the clustering in the increase in stock prices that has occurred in the U.S. since the move to decimal pricing.

Dr. Ikenberry is frequently asked to speak to academic, government, corporate officers, and the broad investment communities. His research is regularly mentioned in the popular press in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Smart Money, Barron's, Business Week and The Economist. He is a frequent guest on various television programs including CNBC, Bloomberg Television, and the Nightly Business Report. On occasion, corporations ask Dr. Ikenberry to comment on various aspects of their corporate financing decisions including their dividend and share repurchase policies. He lives in Champaign, Illinois, and is married with two young children.

Charles M. Kahn is the Bailey Professor of Finance and Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois. He received his Ph. D. in economics from Harvard University. He has published extensively in economics and finance journals on issues in the economics of asymmetric information and its effects on institutional arrangements. He has been a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College of Cambridge University. He has served as a consultant to the Bank for International Settlements on inter-authority coordination of bank regulation and as a consultant at central banks, including the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Cleveland, and New York,  the European Central Bank, and the Bank of England, where he has researched incentive effects of payment and settlement systems.

George G. Pennacchi is a professor of finance and a co-director of the Office for Banking Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Also, he is the Program Coordinator for Deposit Insurance at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's Center for Financial Research and is a Research Associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.  His research focuses on financial intermediaries and the valuation of fixed-income securities and government guarantees. Currently, he is an editor of the Journal of Financial Intermediation and an associate editor of the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Financial Services Research, and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. Previously, he was an associate editor for the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, and Management Science, and a co-editor of Advances in Futures and Options Research. His consulting experience includes work for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.  He has been a visiting professor at the Università Bocconi in Milan, Italy, and was a member of the finance faculty at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Pennacchi received a Sc.B. degree in applied mathematics from Brown University in 1977 and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984.

Joshua M. Pollet joined the Illinois faculty in finance in 2004. He earned his B.A. from Emory (magna cum laude) and his Ph.D. from Harvard. He teaches courses in asset pricing, behavioral finance, and corporate finance.

Michael S. Weisbach, the Stanley C. and Joan J. Golder Distinguished Chair in Corporate Finance, earned his Ph.D. from MIT and taught at the University of Rochester and the University of Arizona before joining the faculty of the Department of Finance at Illinois in 1999. Professor Weisbach also serves as the Director of the College’s Office for the Study of Private Equity and Entrepreneurial Finance.

He teaches courses in corporate finance, private equity, the economics of organizations, and corporate governance and control. His research interests lie in the general area of corporate finance, with a special focus on corporate governance and control and organizational incentives. Other areas include acquisitions, divestitures, and the termination of pension funds after corporate takeovers.

Since 2000 Professor Weisbach has been a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is an associate editor of a number of journals, including The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Financial Economics, and Financial Management. His research has been supported by research grants from the National Science Foundation and the Q Group. He is frequently cited in national and international media, including ABCNEWS.com, Barron’s, Bloomberg Business News, The Chicago Tribune, The Economist, The Financial Times, Forbes, The New York Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal.

Scott Weisbenner is an assistant professor in the Department of Finance. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from MIT and has been on the Illinois faculty since 2000. Before coming to Illinois, he worked as an economist for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in the capital markets section.

Professor Weisbenner teachers courses in corporate finance, and his research interests include household portfolio decisions and how they are influenced by taxation and psychological factors; issues concerning retirement saving and pension plans; and corporate payout policy. He has published articles in such journals as the American Economic Review and Journal of Finance, and his work has been cited in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Barron’s, and Smart Money. Professor Weisbenner has been a research fellow at the National Bureau of Research (NBER) since 2002.